Hughie

Eugene O'Neill's brief 1942 letter to George Jean Nathan is the standard touchstone for reviews and analyses of the one-act Hughie, and its ubiquity is understandable. The two-character, three-o'clock-in-the-morning drama about a melancholy Broadway sport and a taciturn night clerk was never produced in O'Neill's lifetime, leaving a regrettable void of documentation—neither grousing nor gratitude from the dramatist about problems solved or worsened as the work got on its feet. Additionally, the script has a conspicuous tic: the Night Clerk barely speaks, yet he is given a near-riot of written articulation in the form of unspoken stage directions. As Erie Smith, the voluble small-time hustler, waxes on about his mock triumphs and paralyzing regrets while memorializing the recently deceased Hughie, the hotel's previous night clerk, the stage directions read, “The Clerk's mind has slipped away to the clanging bounce of garbage cans in the outer night. He is thinking: A job I'd like. I'd bang those cans louder than they do! I'd wake up the whole damned city!” It is a characteristic description, tantalizing in its clarity—but how to put it on the stage? O'Neill mused to Nathan that any satisfying production of Hughie might require some combination of sound and film, but added, “Let whoever does it figure it out. I wouldn't want to be around to see it.”Seventy years on, director Doug Hughes has taken up O'Neill's suggestion of voiceover and video possibilities in his production for Washington, DC's Shakespeare Theatre Company. The hour-long show cleverly camouflaged several video screens into the dingy beige walls of Neil Patel's vast and vacant purgatorial hotel lobby set. Now and then Erie's reveries cued a mood or memory that Hughes and projection designer Darrel Maloney depicted with gauzy images that manifested and vanished like dreams. A woman's face, for instance, flickered into view before shifting and dissolving as if erased by a creeping layer of soot. This image and others never suffered from on-the-nose obviousness, nor were they a constant presence in the design. They tactfully underscored Erie's haunted storytelling.The voiceover was a greater threat to upstage the acting, or so it seemed as laughter greeted early stage directions drily uttered by Reg Rogers (whose radio-ready voice, redolent of blunt 1930s–1940s announcers, was recorded, not live). Laughter was an unanticipated factor a year ago as the STC staged the aside-filled Strange Interlude (a production that indirectly led to this show when actor Richard Schiff, joining the STC for a benefit event last year, noted the Interlude poster and suggested Hughie). Rogers's deadpan stage directions, coupled with the granite postures and blank demeanor of Randall Newsome as the Night Clerk, sometimes added gravitas, but it also continued to trigger comic relief periodically through the performance. O'Neill's colorful language was welcome, to a point, as it helped round out both the late night cityscape and the largely wordless clerk. But it did not resolve the challenge of fully rendering this character. Al Pacino also tried voicing the stage directions in his 1996 production, which Schiff read with Pacino in very early preproduction stages. For a Hughie last year in Toronto, the Night Clerk's stage directions were rendered in supertitles. The quest continues.The core of the show, of course, is the actor playing Erie Smith, a part that has been donned by such major O'Neill interpreters as Jason Robards and Brian Dennehy. Schiff's turn was magnetic yet offhand as he shuffled into the shabby lobby and coolly initiated the slangy chat and one-sided banter with Newsome's fleetingly cheerful but durably dull clerk. The play's flamboyantly idiomatic language, packed with the streetwise lingo of the gambler, the womanizer, and the subtle self-promoter, felt effortless and personable—an intimate performance Erie had long tuned for Hughie. The new clerk's nonresponsiveness is a comedown from Hughie's ready ear and flattering attentiveness, which goads Erie back toward his unhappy self. Hughie is a pipe-dream play, and Schiff, costumed by Catherine Zuber in a rumpled three-piece beige suit only slightly brighter than the grubby walls, artfully conveyed Erie's need to be seen and heard; his lightly worn wiliness and inviting cadences were those of a canny, understated salesman. (Possibly certain patterns from Schiff's winter engagement on Broadway in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, a Pacino vehicle that Schiff acted at night while rehearsing Hughie by day, were still in his muscles and somewhere in his mind.)Schiff and Hughes made notably effective use of the ample emptiness Patel created on both sides of the STC's Lansburgh Theater stage. No moments were more poignant than those when Schiff's Erie drifted away from the lobby's desk, above which an oversized wall clock kept actual time as the dial swept from three to four. In the Hopper-esque solitude of the set's outer edges, Schiff's stillness and/or sudden explosiveness sharply etched Erie's dead end. “I'm fond of Hughie myself,” O'Neill wrote to Nathan in that 1942 letter. The nuance of Hughes's staging, particularly in Schiff's wounded, slightly rakish, wholly sympathetic portrayal of Erie, made O'Neill's a sentiment to endorse.

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